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This is a lovely hardback edition of the 11th Joe DeMarco thriller by Mike Lawson, originally from the Central Arkansas library. Apparently, Little Rock funded upgrades to the library, presumably either buying or later replacing this book. It amuses me to think of this book travelling all the way to England, and honestly it is in great condition so was perfectly good enough to stay in Little Rock library.

As for the story, Joe is sent to Boston to help a feisty, old lady, Elinore Dobbs, who is being unfairly treated by her landlord to force her to move out. The landlord wants to develop a large part of the area, of which Elinore’s building is one part. Legally, there is not much DeMarco can do, given a lack of support from local law enforcement and councils.

DeMarco doesn’t always have to stay within the law though, and this story gets personal when Joe and later Elinore are attacked. Joe enlists the services of Delray, a henchman he met in a previous book, to frame the developer and his go-to thugs.

To be honest, the plot gets a bit out of hand when they involve a South American former drug smuggler in the frame, though the cameo appearance of a beautiful female assassin, La Leona, is fun.

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This is the 10th book in Lawson’s Joe Demarco series, and I picked up a nice hardback edition from World of Books (originally owned by Boston Public Library no less). 

In this story, Demarco operates without Emma or Neil, his usual collaborators. Sent to North Dakota, his task is to help the granddaughter of a friend of Mahoney (his boss).  She has already been assaulted in an attempt to make her stop her online blogging attacks on Curtis, a billionaire oil tycoon. 

The violence escalates from there, with Demarco getting increasingly personally committed to helping the girl and her grandfather track down the perpetrators and exact revenge.

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This is the 9th book in Lawson’s Joe Demarco series. In the previous 8 books, we’ve established that Joe’s father worked for the mob and that legacy caused Joe difficulties in finding a suitable job, even with his law degree. In this book, the author goes back in time to give more colour to Joe’s father’s character, his work as a hitman and how he came to die.

The main plot point in this thriller is that Joe finds out who killed his father, and seeks to take revenge in some form. As Joe is a reputable person, without his father’s penchant for violence, he has to decide how to go about this – can he find a way to ruin the killer’s life without resorting to a silenced pistol? Fortunately, he has Emma, a former spy, to help him.

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This is the 8th in Lawson’s Joe Demarco series, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Picking books by new authors from charity book shops is rather fun, sometimes it’s a dead loss, but occasionally I get a real gem. That’s what happened with this series, having bought The Payback, the second in this series. I’ve caught up on the others (trying to stick to reading them in order!) and this is one of the best.

House Odds features each of the usual characters in this series – primarily Joe Demarco (a political fixer with a background in law and a shady family history) and John Mahoney ( Joe’s boss, prominent Democrat congressman and formally Speaker of the House). We have cameos by Emma (often Joe’s accomplice in these thrillers), Neil (computer hacker), Mary Pat (John’s wife), and Alice (Joe’s insider at a telecom firm who sells him information).

As ever, Joe is set an impossible task by Mahoney, to investigate why his middle daughter Molly has been charged with insider trading and clean up the situation. Joe would rather sort out his love life or play golf, but he makes contact with the mob and finds that Molly is not the innocent girl he first thought.

Lots going on in this book, the bravery of Joe Demarco in some of these situations is commendable (although his dad was a hitman, Joe himself stays out of conflict whenever possible), and we see the full scale of Mahoney’s ruthless side.

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